The influence of prediction on bilingual language production: evidence from semantic classifier congruency

This study aims to investigate if predictions can influence subsequent language production in monolingual and bilingual situations. The possibility to correctly predict an upcoming response was operationalized by means of semantic classifier congruency. Participants were instructed to name a picture (e.g., firemen) after seeing or hearing a semantically congruent vs. incongruent classifier (e.g., a crew of). In Experiment 1 with English monolinguals, better performance was observed in semantically congruent trials (a crew of firemen) than in semantically incongruent trials (a packet of ants). In Experiments 2 and 3 with Chinese-English bilinguals, this semantic classifier congruency effect was replicated, but the effect differed in size as a function of the language (larger for L1 Chinese than for L2 English). Additionally, bilingual language control was influenced as the language-switch cost was smaller in congruent than in incongruent trials. Together, these findings suggest that prediction influences both L1 and L2 language production and that this facilitation of language production through prediction had a further impact on language control during language switching.